stone vs skills vs bag

The problem

Despite the fact I’ve designed my not degree so that I’ll spend a lot of time in my sandboxes working on core skills in a simplified environments I’ve still been failing and resisting.

(& I’m definately aware that I’ve been facing some depression of late which is the kind of thing one must expect from time to time when they have bipolar-and has not being helping things.)

One of the ways I’ve been resisting is instead of spending time in these skill based sandboxes I’ve been talking about my not degree with LLMs.

I call this problem being stuck on the House of Meta as one contemplates things and does a lot of thinking about thinking, so to speak-or meta-cognition.

Where I want to be with my not degree is “living” less in the House of Meta and more in the House of Craft.

The house of craft

While I’ve only recently coined a cute name for what I am trying to do looking back at things there have been multiple attempts at trying to spend more time in my more skillful sandboxes.

These include:

A pivotal House Concert

One night I went to a wonderful house concert put on by Australian Neo-classical pianist and composer Rose Riebl. It was at a house in the inner city and I sat on a cushion during proceedings.

I came home and with quite some frustration typing into chatGPT later that night:

“Given how much i love music how can i be so revolted by the task of music practice”

based on a night of glorious, gorgeous music I was feeling frustrated that I have in my life up to now been unable to partake in being a musician and experiencing music from the inside out to anything like the level I might have aspired to.

Though quite a long conversation I came up with this idea:

“Maybe at the start of my workday i literally pick up a piece of gravel and put it in my left pocket and when i get home and do something musical i swap it to other pocket before changing out of my work pants "

This was the beginning of a wonderful two weeks where I practiced multiple instruments.

At the time my idea of role impermance which suggests that people with ADHD have problems not just with object impermenance but also that specific roles, like that of musician can go to sleep with dissuse was $

By touching the stone in my pocket during each day I saw myself as reminding myself not just of my intention to practice but indeed that I am a musician.

And then it stopped.

After this partially successful experiment I always felt I was on to something important, but also that there was something about things that I was obviously missing.

skills - a new logger and a new attempt at the problem

Later on with the Not Degree now in full swing I identified that I wasn’t spending my time within my sandboxes properly was being distracted from doing so.

At this time I didn’t probably have clear language to describe this problem but I knew something was off so I created the skills logger.

The idea was that when timing my Not Degree I would use my normal s and e loggers and within these measured time periods I would run my skills logger which was run with the simple commands

skills s

skills e

which saved durations to an extra file.

The problem I’d identified was real but I found after using the skills logger a couple of times I ditched it.

It’s now clear that while I was again trying to solve the right problem I wasn’t yet being specific enough.

bag & sandchain

I thought my Not Degree was designed in such a way that it was trivially easy to get into my sandboxes.

It turns out it was time to make it even easier…

In turned out that there was still uneccessary friction.

First I defined what my sandboxes actually where in a sandbox-list.txt

Next I vibe coded a very simple tool called bag which fills a file called bag.txt with the contents of sandbox-list.txt and selects one at random.

It allows you to answer yes or no to the suggestion and if you say yes it removes it from bag.txt. This way repeated runnings of bag result in all sandboxes being visited.

Once the bag.txt bag is empty it refreshes it from sandbox-list.txt

The 5+ rule

One of the things that can happen with this setup is as the bag empties out you get fewer and fewer options and they might not be ones that appeal.

I have decided that this little bit of friction is acceptable and the best way to approach it is to make the rule that 5 minutes and over counts as an acceptable session length, so one and visit even those sandboxes that might not appeal much in a given moment.

sandchain

The final piece of the puzzle is that I wanted there to be historical data so that I can look back and see when sandboxes are entered over time.

I created a tool called sandchain (shortened to “sc” when typing at the command line) which allows one to quickly record which sandbox we’ve entered.

It saves to a file called sandchain.csv in this format…

date,sandboxes 2026-04-11,“dreaming-spanish,sing-the-numbers”

The start again problem

My Not Degree is built around the idea that I need to make revisiting the Not Degree trivially easy, and record evidence of effort to solve the effort as water disappearing on a hot frying pan problem.

bag and sandchain solves this problem at the level of individual sandboxes which is warranted by the recognition of the fact I want plenty of time spent learning skills in the House of Craft.

stone was initially great at clarifying intention and skills looked like it was measuring the right thing but it turns out time isn’t the key variable – stepping through the doorways of individual sandboxes is where it’s at…